While I admit that this is a tough call, and I can see coherent arguments for either one, if the FDA was _trying_ to infuriate people who disagree with them, th

While I admit that this is a tough call, and I can see coherent arguments for either one, if the FDA was _trying_ to infuriate people who disagree with them, they could hardly have done a better job than this. It essentially implies that other nations, most prominently the U.K., that decide to gamble the other way, are foolish or unaware that there are risks. This is manifestly not the case. It is a gamble, and there are certainly risks, but no one who is advocating changing the dose regimen on the fly is suggesting otherwise, that I know of. The motivation for going with one dose for twice as many people (in a given period of time), is that currently we seem on track to have the vaccine show up just barely too late to do much good. The virus is getting better at spreading all the time, and at the current rate of production, even if everything were distributed more or less instantly (which it isn't), we won't get a vaccine to most people before they get exposed to the virus anyway. Now, there are still certainly arguments to be made that sticking with the tested regimen is the least bad option. None of them were present in this statement, which more or less attacks a straw-man argument that changing the dose regimen is without risk. If they were trying to make people angry with them, they could hardly have done a better job.